The manufacture of printed circuit boards has become extremely competitive in the last decade particularly with the advent of IC chips which have greatly reduced both the size of the board and the number of total components that need to be mounted on any specific board.
Printed circuit boards, before the addition of any components, are manufactured with a predetermined pattern of apertures that are interconnected by "printed" conductors formed directly on the board surface. The conductors are formed by a thin metallic film on the surface of the boards formed by lamination, etching or other selective configuration process.
Because of this need to manufacture boards at the lowest possible cost while maintaining adequate quality, automated equipment has been devised for not only manufacturing the basic board but also mounting the components including IC chips, resistors, capacitors, potentiometers, and other components.
Other automated equipment, such as adjusting drivers for board mounted potentiometers is available for trimming the board circuitry after completion.
In this quest for reducing completed board cost, many of these board mounted components have been reduced in size resulting in flexible frames and thinner, more fragile, terminals so that the structural integrity of many board mounted components has been reduced. While structural integrity is not necessarily essential in many printed circuit board components because their loading is electrical as opposed to mechanical, in some cases this lack of structural integrity has created manufacturing problems.
One of these problems is holding the components against the board while its through board projecting terminals are soldered to the printed conductors. Automated holders for the more fragile components tend to misalign the components during soldering. If further automated processing is required, this misalignment causes non-alignment between such other equipment and the component.
One such further processing is the automated adjustment of trimming potentiometers, and because the fragile potentiometers are not stable they tend to bend causing the adjustment drivers to be misaligned with the potentiometer actuators.
It is a primary object of the present invention to ameliorate the problems noted above in processing fragile components on a printed circuit board.